"When people ask me about my story, I just go through the positive stuff: the tent-pole moments, the big landmark checkpoints."

"There's only so far you can take a relationship before you got to get into things that are too serious or over the top. I'm 20 years old. I was in a relationship with a girl I love for three years. Where do you go after three years? Then you've got to start thinking about other things, and I'm too young to think about those things."

"My mom is the backbone not just of my family but of many families."

"My dad is a motorcycle guy, not some Hollywood dude."

"It is a humble truth that the richness of existence is found in simple harmonies, not superfluous splendors — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves."

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand."

"Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia."